For better or worse I’ve been buried in video-land for the past several days. Bossman and I decided that it would be nice to have some video content in time for the new design launch. Being that I’ve never done anything with video, I’ve been cramming.

It’s been a lot of fun. I’m using a borrowed five-year-old Panasonic Palmcorder to do the actual recording and then processing the video in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and Flash MX 2004. I tried recording voice narration to go with the video, but I have an awful microphone on my computer and couldn’t eliminate the hiss. As it stands, I’m using some minimal captioning. Music was easy to find given the number of talented students and alumni.

I’ve been having some serious problems with my flash players and figuring out how I’m supposed to encode the flash video. I ended up ditching the free player (that I use on this blog still) and spending $30 on a somewhat more polished product: the Wimpy Wasp Player. Figuring out the optimal way to compress the video for best quality and most accessible bandwith has been difficult.

I had trouble trying to reason out why the little time seek bar wasn’t advancing properly. Turns out my version of Flash isn’t encoding the duration meta data correctly in the FLV. I found a free fix, though, using a program called FLVMDI.

Another annoying bug is that, with all of the Flash players, you have to click on them twice to get them to respond in Internet Explorer. Turns out one of Microsoft’s updates to ActiveX created this bug. The Wimpy Player came with a Javascript-based workaround that I’m using.

However, so far the biggest lesson learned has been: buy a tripod.

Here’s the latest significant draft:

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Higher Education. It has been viewed 1153 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!